About

Between the World and Me (2015)by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Overview

Between the World and Me won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the NAACP Image Award. It was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, a #1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller, and was named among the “top ten best books” of the year by over a dozen popular magazines.

About Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for
The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues.A MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow, Coates received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his
Atlantic cover story "The Case for Reparations." Coates's first memoir,
The Beautiful Struggle (2009) told of his youth in West Baltimore.
Between the World and Me (2015), written as a father to his own son, became an award-winningbestseller. Coates' forthcoming book,
We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) will be an annotated collection of new and previously published essays on the Obama era. He lives in New York with his wife and son.

Reviews

“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.”

— Toni Morrison

“Powerful and passionate . . . profoundly moving . . . a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.”

— Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times

“Extraordinary . . . [Coates] writes an impassioned letter to his teenage son—a letter both loving and full of a parent’s dread—counseling him on the history of American violence against the black body, the young African-American’s extreme vulnerability to wrongful arrest, police violence, and disproportionate incarceration.”

—David Remnick,
The New Yorker

“[Coates] has crafted a highly provocative, thoughtfully presented, and beautifully written narrative. . . . Much of what Coates writes may be difficult for a majority of Americans to process, but that’s the incisive wisdom of it. Read it, think about it, take a deep breath and read it again. The spirit of James Baldwin lives within its pages.”

—
The Christian Science Monitor

LibGuide

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